Author Archives: jwelch

A common question with SSIS is how to handle adding headers and footers to a flat file when the format is different that the data rows. This gets more difficult when the header or footer needs to contain data based … Continue reading →

Stuart Ozer on the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team (CAT) has posted a new tool to CodePlex to help with the management of "staging" tables for swapping data in and out of partitioned tables. Since this is a common scenario … Continue reading →

Previously, I posted about how multiple errors in SSIS can be combined into a single unit for emailing or logging. Recently, a thread on the MSDN forums pointed out that the example wasn’t quite complete. While it does show how … Continue reading →

There’s a minor annoyance in SSIS with the way the diagram of the package is saved. If you’ve ever spent time working in a package with a lot of objects, you’ve probably encountered it. You move some objects around, save … Continue reading →

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, but real life keeps intruding. I did a presentation on SSIS performance for the Charlotte SQL Server User Group at the end of November. It went well, though I was trying … Continue reading →

A few months back I reported a minor but annoying bug in the way NULL dates are handled in SSIS. It’s documented here, but basically, if you use an Execute SQL Task to set a DateTime variable to NULL, the … Continue reading →

As part of my standard approach (and the one used by Mariner), I use configurations in SSIS quite heavily. My preference is to use the SQL Server configuration type, since it keeps all the configurations in one place. XML configurations … Continue reading →

The download link is here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3BF4C5CA-B905-4EBC-8901-1D4C1D1DA884&displaylang=en Evidently there have been some issues getting it on the Connect site, so they are hosting it in Microsoft’s Download Center for now.

BIDSHelper 1.2 is now available at CodePlex. The new version has a number of SSIS specific features, like expression and configuration highlighting, a tool window that lists all the expressions in the package, and a Package Smart Diff tool. Darren … Continue reading →